How To Develop an Effective Content Marketing Strategy

Content marketing has become one of the most essential vehicles of digital marketers in recent years and it’s easy to see why. High quality content that people sincerely want to read and voluntarily share is a powerful place to expose people to marketing messages and to enhance to online visibility of your website.

Many businesses wisely choose to have their content marketing taken care of by an expert SEO agency that understands the best approach in order to drive traffic and engagement.

As with any strategy, your content marketing needs to be documented effectively in order to keep everything uniform as so that you can easily measure the results. Failing to do this invites a whole series of headaches that could be easily avoided by practising some due diligence.

You’ll be glad to know that while creating a content marketing strategy is essential, it’s doesn’t have to be overwhelming or complicated. The following will take a look at some simple steps you can implement in order to develop a highly effective content marketing strategy.

1. Find Out Who Your Audience Is, Exactly

As with any kind of marketing, understanding your audience is the most important part of crafting a message they will be receptive to. The best place to start is to examine what you know about your existing customer base and to use this information to make predictions about the kind of content they would most enjoy or get value out of.

Some of questions you want to be asking are:

What is the primary reason for buying a product or service like your own?

What is the deep down, sincere reason why they are buying your product or service? What fantasy or lifestyle does it enable for them?

What factors impact the buying decision? For example, a product may require training to use or may only work well in certain climates.

What results do people expect from your product or service?

What aspects of your competitor’s products draw customers to them?

What are the major barriers to buying your product or service?

While this amount of information may seem overwhelming to try and collect, it is relatively simple once you break it down into actionable steps. Try and start by interviewing a handful of your target audience and start building a customer persona from that.

2. Where Does Your Audience Congregate Online?

You should be able to use the information from step one to help answer this. Try and figure out the top domains that your audience visits to read news and interesting articles so that you can target your content here.

Don’t spread your content too thinly. It’s better to have a few high quality articles spread across a small number of authoritative domains than it is to have hundreds of articles spread across lots of throwaway websites.

3. What Kind Of Content Does Your Audience Like?

Now that you understand who your audience is and where they like to hang out, you can start thinking about the kinds of content your audience will be most receptive to. This normally changes based on the medium of communication, for example; videos tend to perform better on Facebook while infographics are very popular on Twitter.

The whole point is to figure out what kind of content the audience is most likely to share voluntarily because they found sincere value in it. When this content is tied to your business, it means that audiences are inadvertently acting as marketing vehicles for your business, drawing in even more eyeballs.

In terms of SEO, the more that content linked to your domain is shared, the more authoritative search engines will assume your website is. Ultimately this means higher rank positions in the search results of major players like Google.

Tina Johnson helped bring The Marketing Folks from a-weekly newsletter to a full-fledged news site by creating a new website and branding. She continues to assist in keeping the site responsive and well organized for the readers. As a contributor to The Marketing Folks, Tara mainly covers industry new.